“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work” John 4:34
I received a great question in an email about a month ago and would love to share it with you. It was in regards to “life’s meaning” and “living for God’s pleasure”.
Q: I don’t know if you can answer this, but I would like to know what you think. Part of my own (and I’m sure many others) motivation behind searching to find God comes from an emptiness inside me, and the horrible feeling that there is no meaning to my life. If the meaning of people’s lives as Christians is to follow God and to do his will, then what is the meaning of life itself? Why did God create us? Did he create us simply to give us the gift of life because it was in his power to do so? Tonight you said something about us living our lives for God for “His pleasure.” I’m not sure if that is exactly how you put it, but I didn’t understand what you meant by “for His pleasure.” Could you please explain that as well?
A: If God created us for communion with Himself then our greatest pleasure will be bringing Him pleasure by doing His will. The beauty of this is His will is accomplished and He is glorified when His children enjoy Him. Our enjoyment of Him, is discovered when, we make His interests our interests until they become our passions. Jesus gave us the example when He said in John 4:34 “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work”. In other words, what satisfied or fed His Soul was doing His Fathers will. It is like a marriage. If I want to be close to my wife I have to make her interests my interest. My greatest happiness as a husband is pleasing my wife. Not for what I can get out of the relationship, but how I can sacrificially invest into it. Inevitably this leads to the overall deepening of the marriage and brings greater meaning to life itself.
Emptiness to Fullness
“And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.” John 1:16
“Once I knew only darkness and stillness…my life was without past or future…but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.” This came from Helen Keller who was an American Author and Educator who was also blind and deaf.
Not many live out their existence in physical darkness and silence as Keller did, but many live out their lives today in a spiritual emptiness that brings about a darkness and silence of a different sort. When life is lived without meaning, when every decision seems to have no weight upon the value of existence, when “Do what you like” becomes an unsatisfactory way to exist, emptiness comes. The question remains, “What do I like if nothing ultimately has value?” This conundrum is what Milan Kundera called “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in his 1984 novel of the same title. He is right. If there is nothing beyond this life, “being” does become unbearably light and empty.
Our feeble attempt to fill the void, to answer the question of biography, always ends in a filling with things that accentuate the emptiness, increase the darkness and decrease awareness. What then must we do to be satisfied? How can we escape this emptiness?
Well, I think we must begin with something outside of ourselves and that something is Someone. The uncaused Cause, the Author behind the story, the Magician behind the magic. But if there is a Cause, why is the effect so wrong? If there is a Author, why is the story so sad? If there is a Magician, why is the magic so dark?
But what if the Author permitted freedom within the parameters of the Story that gave the characters the right to write into its pages the unfortunate consequences of decisions they make apart from the One who gave them “being?” And what if these decisions put into motion a series of effects that has turned the story, at times, into a nightmare?
But, again, what if the Author himself entered into the story to set right, that which has gone wrong? And what if that was the plan for the story before the story began? And in the end, there really will be a happy ending and the Author Himself is the Hero who makes it so. Would not this turn the nightmare into a fairytale? There is magic in this story and it is available to us. God has entered into His own story to set it right, through His Son’s life, death and resurrection. We look to Jesus, the Author and the Finisher of our faith and find in Him, the fullness for our emptiness. The Author reminds us and invites us to enter into His plan for His story where the unbearable lightness of being becomes the weight of Glory.